Ansi2html

At times it may be good idea to display the exact terminal output to viewers to easily convey what’s being done. The cut and paste method works fine but ANSI coloring will be lost. Lately I had some friends in the forums to help me figure this out.

Ansi2html is a program that can convert ANSI colored output and display it as a webpage. Ansi2html is one of the programs that is part of kbtin, a MUD-client. For Gentoo users, an ebuild thankfully rids the cruft and only ansi2html is built. Thanks to timeBandit for pointing this out and thanks to tarpman for the ebuild.

Using ansi2html is easy, just enter:

command -color | ansi2html > command.html

The color argument is required because color output is often repressed when output to a console or terminal (most popular commands have them). For example:

I was thinking ansi2html might be good for displaying text inline on this Blog (as in preformatted colored text) but ansi2html builds a custom, built-in, css that make this all too unrealistic to build inline.

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